Deadliest Sea (20 page)

While he was operating the hoist, DeBolt focused his attention on what was going on outside the helicopter. But glancing over his shoulder now, the flight mech was alarmed by how cramped the cabin had become. One guy had his feet hanging partway out the open cabin door. There was water everywhere. Even one more body and there would be a risk of one of the survivors sliding out and ending up back in the Bering Sea.

“That’s it,” DeBolt told the pilots, as he pulled the basket into the helo with Evan Holmes inside. Never before in his career had DeBolt been in the position of even considering leaving anybody behind. Yet now he was sure that it wasn’t safe to lift a single person more. The flight mech got the fishermen packed in as well as he could, then lowered the hoist line one more time for Starr-Hollow, who was floating alone in the waves below.

I
T WAS
6:00
A.M
.
WHEN
B
RIAN
M
C
L
AUGHLIN
heard the C-130 break in over the radio.

“Coast Guard rescue 6007, this is rescue 1705.”

The Herc, McLaughlin realized with relief, must be overhead.

“1705, 6007. Good to hear from you,” McLaughlin answered. “How you doing?”

They were good, the C-130 crew member answered. He asked for the helo’s position.

“Roger,” McLaughlin replied. “We’re at 5, 3, 5, 3 north. 1, 6, 9, 5, 7 west. We’ve been keeping our guard with the
Alaskan
[sic]
Warrior,
they’re Good Sam en route right now.

“We presently have seventeen people on board including our rescue swimmer,” McLaughlin continued. “Or at this point, well, sixteen, we’re about to pick our rescue swimmer up now. Then we’re going to offload some of these passengers.”

“6007, rescue 1705. Good copy, you have guard with
Alaska Warrior
. We’ll relate to COMMSTA, and we will, we will take your guard at this time.”

From McLaughlin’s perspective, the back of the Jayhawk looked like a sea of red. The fishermen were so packed in, it was hard to tell where one body stopped and another began. Though the first few men they’d pulled up had been fairly energetic, the end of that big group included a couple guys who were severely hypothermic. Some of them needed to get warmed up right away.

McLaughlin knew from his earlier conversation with the
Munro
that District Command was recommending the helo bring their victims to Dutch Harbor. The search and rescue coordinators in Juneau had been in touch with personnel in the fishing port, who were ready to receive the survivors. McLaughlin’s crew would be able to refuel there, then return to the scene. It would be the safest option for the men they already had, and for the crew.

McLaughlin remembered a couple times when a Coast Guard aircrew had been told there’d be fuel in Dutch. And when they got there? No gas. The Coast Guard wasn’t supplying the fuel in the port; it was a civilian, a local guy. Sometimes he would say he’d be there. Then he wouldn’t. More important, though, Dutch was such a long trip—150 miles one way. To McLaughlin and the rest of the Jayhawk team the decision was obvious—Dutch was out. It was just too far. All around them individual lights were still beating in the waves.

“Roger,” McLaughlin answered to the Herc’s offer to take the Jayhawk’s guard.

“Can you guys find out where the
Munro
’s at?” McLaughlin asked. “We need to find out how far out they are. We have an option of dropping these survivors off to the
Warrior
but
with these seas, it’s just—wherever we put them is going to be hairy.

“If the
Munro
’s close, it would be ideal to bring them [there], but I think they’re still going to be about sixty miles out.”

“Roger that, 6007. Good copy. We’ll…get that information for you.”

McLaughlin had already been in radio contact with the
Alaska Warrior
. The FCA trawler was less than ten miles away. The pilot knew that the
Munro,
which had both fuel and trained medical personnel, was much, much farther. The Jayhawk was too big to land on either vessel.

With a dozen lights still flashing below, and every minute reducing those men’s odds of survival, McLaughlin made a tough call: They’d attempt to lower their survivors to the
Warrior
.

T
HE CREW OF THE
C
OAST
G
UARD’S
fixed-wing airplane, the Hercules C-130, was at twenty thousand feet when they began their descent. Pilots Matt Duben and Tommy Wallin calculated that they would save fuel—and time—by using the acceleration created by their descent to reach the disaster site. There were two needles on the Herc’s airspeed indicator: a white one that displayed the plane’s current speed and a red one that pointed to the aircraft’s maximum allowable speed.

Duben and Wallin thought of themselves as good stewards of Coast Guard property. They weren’t going to push the aircraft to its limits unless there was a damn good reason. Now they had one. People were in the water. Wallin kept his eye on those red and white needles, letting them hover right over each other. It was a technique called “flying the barber pole.” Twenty thousand feet, ten thousand, five thousand. At three thousand feet they passed through the cloud layer—and into a snow squall.
Tiny flakes pounded against the plane’s windshield. Then, more than two and a half hours after lifting off from Elmendorf, they saw it.

It was as if they were approaching a small city. More than a dozen tiny lights were pulsing eerily in the darkness. From fifteen hundred feet, the men couldn’t tell which lights were people and which were rafts. Was there a boat? All they could see were the blinking strobes, signaling what they hoped were people still clinging to life in the waves below.

W
hen the
Alaska Ranger
left Dutch Harbor early on Saturday afternoon, the
Alaska Warrior
was still tied up at the pier, its crew loading on the supplies needed for what might be a multiweek fishing trip. It was late afternoon by the time the
Warrior
’s deckhands untied the ship’s lines and sailed out into Captains Bay.

Like the
Ranger,
the
Warrior
was a one-time Mississippi mud boat, an oil-rig supply ship that had been bought by the Fishing Company of Alaska and converted into a bottom trawler years earlier. The ship had about the same size crew as the
Ranger
and fished for the same species on the same fishing grounds. She was a slower boat, though, with a boxier design; the
Warrior
’s top speed was just 10 or 11 knots, as opposed to the
Ranger
’s 14 or 15.

Her captain was forty-six-year-old Scott Krey, a broad-jawed, blond-haired Seattle fisherman who’d been working in Alaska for twenty years, the last two as the captain of the
Warrior
. He was asleep when his first mate, Raymond Falante, called him in his stateroom, around 2:30
A.M
. Ray had just heard from the mate on the
Alaska Spirit,
who had been called by David Silveira. The
Alaska Ranger
was sinking.

Scott knew most of the guys on the
Ranger;
he’d dealt with 80 percent of the crew at one time or another. Both Pete Jacobsen and David Silveira were on the ship as a favor to the company, Scott knew. Neither man had been happy to be put on there, but they were the types who were going to do their jobs.

The
Warrior
was already full throttle toward the
Ranger
’s reported position when Captain Scott got to the wheelhouse. They were about forty miles away—but still much closer than the
Spirit
or any of the other FCA ships.

M
OST OF THE
W
ARRIOR
CREW HAD
at least a couple of friends on the
Ranger
. It wasn’t uncommon for Fishing Company of Alaska employees to move between boats. The
Warrior
’s first mate, Raymond Falante, had been the mate on the
Ranger
until late 2007. And the
Warrior
’s chief engineer, Ed Cook, had helped his younger brother Danny get a job with the FCA just a few months before. Now Dan was the chief engineer on the
Ranger
.

Ed’s original idea had been that they’d share the position of chief on the
Warrior
. Ed was already sixty, Danny fifty-eight. They were ready to slow down, to spend a few more months a year somewhere other than Alaska. Ed, especially, wanted more time with his wife, Cindy. A couple years before, he’d been back at their modest riverside home in Washington’s Cascade Mountains for just a week when the company called: They needed
him to come back up immediately. The FCA would write Cindy a $1,000 “sorry” check to make up for it.

So Ed went back. It wasn’t about the money, he’d just felt obligated. If he and Danny shared the same job, this type of thing wouldn’t happen again, Ed thought. But it hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped. The company was desperate for qualified people. Right away, they put Danny on the
Ranger
.

Ed and Danny had grown up in San Diego, where their father was also a fishing boat engineer. They were the third and fourth of eight kids in a boisterous Irish Catholic family. When he was fourteen, Ed left school to join his dad on the tuna boats. A couple years later, Danny did the same. At seventeen, Ed enlisted in the Marines. Danny followed soon after. They both became sergeants and fought in Vietnam.

When they came home, Ed and Danny went back to tuna fishing out of San Diego. From the late 1960s, well into the 1980s, the Cook brothers traveled the world on tuna vessels. Grand and gleaming white, many of the tuna ships looked more like yachts than fishing boats. They sailed exclusively in warm waters: off the coast of Mexico and Chile and Peru, through the Panama Canal to the coast of Venezuela, across the Pacific to Hawaii, sometimes even as far as New Zealand or Puerto Rico.

Those were the good days. The few snapshots the brothers had taken in those years showed tan, muscular young men standing shirtless on the deck of a ship, their sun-bleached hair blowing in a tropical breeze. They’d dive and swim off the sides of the boat and pick coconuts and limes on the islands. Wherever the ship was tied up, they’d be able to find a good beach and maybe a great beach bar where most of the fights were over who would pick up the tab.

Along the way, Ed and Danny got their engineering licenses, just like their dad. Each moved steadily up the hierarchy of fish
ing life. The Cook men were part of a large community of fishermen from San Diego, America’s top tuna port. For a long time, the fishing was good, and so was the money. But by the 1980s the industry was changing. Fishing had long been an international free-for-all. Now, most nations wanted to keep for themselves the profit and the jobs that their fishing grounds supplied. By the time the United States established its two-hundred-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (the EEZ) in 1976, many other nations were doing the same. The American tuna companies that for decades fished freely along the shores of foreign nations were now going out of business. Meanwhile, environmental regulations aimed at protecting marine mammals—particularly dolphins—had made it increasingly difficult to make a profit fishing for tuna in U.S. waters. San Diego fishermen began looking for work on foreign-flagged vessels. Some found it, but the jobs were scarce.

By the late 1980s, there was hardly any work left for what had long been a tight, proud community of San Diego tuna fishermen. But there were jobs in Alaska, increasingly in the remote Aleutian Island port of Dutch Harbor. Both brothers knew plenty of men from Southern California who were going north.

With foreign ships out of the newly established EEZ, the potential for American fishermen in Alaska was untapped. Adding to the boom were government incentives that encouraged the construction of new fishing boats or the conversion of preexisting ships into Bering Sea–ready vessels. And so far, the fishing grounds were delivering. There was crab, cod, pollack, and all sorts of groundfish—sole, mackerel, and perch. Big companies were running fleets of big ships and delivering the catch to plants right there in Dutch Harbor—or even processing it on board. Some of the boats in Alaska were hundreds of feet long. They all needed experienced engineers to keep them afloat.

The Cook brothers had worked on a number of different ships
over the years in Alaska. It had only been a few months that they’d both been employed by the FCA, though. Ed had mixed feelings about the company. The people were nice enough, but the
Warrior
was in poor repair compared to other ships he’d worked on. Right away, Ed had noticed that if the crew was inconvenienced by a watertight door, they would just tie it open when they were out at sea. That was goddamned lazy, he felt. And reckless. They were risking everyone’s lives just to save the effort of opening and closing a door a few dozen times a day. It was the Japanese influence on the boats, Ed thought. It seemed to him like the Japanese didn’t take safety seriously or respect American environmental regulations. He’d seen them dump dirty oil overboard at night.

Ed felt that the whole operation had low standards. There were constant problems with the sewage systems getting blocked up. On several occasions, Ed had seen raw sewage sloshing around on the hydraulic room floor. The damn pipes were in awful shape, covered with rust and held together with duct tape. Ed had tried to talk to the higher-ups in Seattle about the problems, and went as far as to send photos and videos he’d taken. He figured that, if they saw the boat’s true condition, they’d take care of things. But there wasn’t much of a reaction. As long as the fish were caught and processed and sold, no one seemed to care much about safety—or hygiene for that matter. He wouldn’t want to eat those fish. For God’s sake, Ed thought, the guys were pissing right on the floor of the factory. Ed had seen processors smoking on the assembly line. Sometimes the ash fell into the conveyor belt full of just-caught fish.

He’d tried to talk to management about it a couple times. “Don’t worry about it, you’re getting your paycheck aren’t you?” he was told.

“How about a little pride in our work?” Ed countered, “In the product we’re all out here breaking our backs for?”

The company’s attitude didn’t seem normal to Ed. He had worked for another big fishing company, Trident Seafoods, before signing up with FCA. One time a fish buyer had found a fly in a box of roe. Management was ready to launch a full
CSI
-style investigation. Was that an American fly or a Japanese fly? How did it get in that box? “This is high-quality product people are spending a lot of money for,” Ed’s boss had lectured the crew. It seemed to Ed that the FCA didn’t care as much about quality. As long as they could sell it, it was good enough.

“E
D
. E
D, THERE’S A PROBLEM
on the
Ranger
. You should come up to the wheelhouse.” It was the middle of the night when Ray Falante pounded on Ed’s cabin door.

Ed pulled on his clothes as fast as he could. When he got up to the bridge, Captain Scott was at the controls.

“What’s going on?” Ed asked.

“The
Ranger
’s sinking, Ed.”

Scott told his chief that the
Ranger
may have dropped a rudder. From what he’d been told, the flooding probably started in the rudder room. It was spreading fast.

Ed looked out into the darkness. The deck was covered with ice. It was blowing hard with big seas.

Captain Scott knew how close the two brothers were. The two men even looked alike, for Christ’s sake—they both had white beards, blue eyes, and round, soft faces that were always rosy red, even in the Alaskan winter. A lot of people had a hard time telling them apart, unless they were side by side. Then it was easy: Ed was the short one, just five foot ten to his brother Danny’s six foot two.

Earlier in the day, just before the
Warrior
left Dutch Harbor, Captain Scott had been on the phone with the
Ranger
.

Ed was fueling the boat when Scott yelled down to him: “Hey, Ed.”

“Yes, sir,” the chief hollered back up to the bridge.

“Your brother called.”

“He did? Well, what’d he say?”

Scott smiled. “To tell you that he loves you.”

“Well,” Ed had yelled back up. “If he calls again, sir, you tell him I love him, too!”

I
NSIDE THE NUMBER THREE LIFE RAFT
the men were sitting in a circle with their backs against the inflated wall. The raft’s waterbed-like floor was wet and the men were cold. Their hands and feet were numb. Outside, the waves pounded relentlessly against the raft. It felt like a roller-coaster they couldn’t get off of. But at least they were alive. The Coast Guard knew where they were and had said they’d be back.

Fisheries observer Jay Vallee had been the first one in the raft. After the port-side number two raft—the one he was assigned to—was lost, there were more people on board than would fit in the remaining two rafts. Jay had told several crewmen that anyone who couldn’t fit inside a raft should tie themselves off to the side. It was something he remembered from his safety training back in Anchorage. Better to be in the water and at least attached to a target large enough for rescuers to see than to be alone in the Bering Sea.

Jay had crossed from the port to the starboard side of the ship and approached the bow rail. The stern, starboard raft—the
Ranger
’s number three raft—had just been launched and was moving up the side of the ship, bolting toward the bow as the
ship plowed backward into the sea. It looked empty. Jay was petrified, but somehow he managed to focus. It felt almost like an out-of-body experience. He took a breath and jumped twenty feet down the side of the boat—and right through the doorway of the tented shelter. He landed on his feet, then fell back on his butt with his legs pointed toward the middle of the raft. He dislocated his right ankle, but, amazingly, he’d done it.

Soon afterward, Jay had helped to pull in a few of the
Ranger
’s processors, including David Hull. Jay could see that David still had his laptop bag with him. You’ve got to be kidding me, Jay thought, as David tumbled into the raft. Soon there were ten of them inside. Every other person except for Jay had been submerged in the water first and was then pulled in. They were wetter than Jay—and colder. He looked around. People were quiet. They looked scared. Jay’s suit fit, and he was dry. He had his PLB, which he knew was still signaling his position to satellites overhead. He was better off, Jay knew, than most of the guys he’d been working with for the past three weeks.

L
IKE THE
R
ANGER
,
THE
W
ARRIOR
SAILED
with two federal fisheries observers every time it left port. Both Beth Dubofsky and Melissa Head were in their twenties and both had been working as observers since the previous summer. Beth and Melissa knew Gwen and Jay. All the observers assigned to FCA ships worked for the Anchorage-based observer contractor Saltwater Inc., whose employees stayed in the same bunkhouse when they were in Dutch Harbor. Now the
Warrior
’s female observers took charge of gathering supplies to treat potentially hypothermic survivors. The most important areas of the body for recirculating heat, they remembered, were the armpits and groin. The two women gathered blankets, and potatoes to warm in the
galley’s microwave. They’d hold them against the bodies of any rescued
Ranger
crewmen.

In the first couple hours after he was woken up, Captain Scott had talked with both Captain Pete and David Silveira multiple times by SAT phone. At first the men didn’t sounded too panicked: “Come and get us, we’re taking on water,” the
Warrior
’s captain was told.